Moleskine, the traditional maker of high-end notepads, released an iPad app last week that brings its distinctive, black and historically famous notebook to the realm of digital applications.
Basically, it is a note-taking application that is customizable and can be used with a stylus. Like physical Moleskines, writing interfaces come in plain (no lines), lined or squared; you can also change the color themes and add pictures. Tied to this is the ability to use Facebook and Twitter from the app and geotag all your posts.
The app that Moleskine has come up with fits in with how they think of themselves – the professional note-taker’s notepad. Yet, the execution leaves a touch to be desired.
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Navigation of the app is not intuitive. Moleskine does provide handy sketches of how to get around but they are cluttered and hard to distinguish when going from the help section to the actual functional application.
For instance, trying to switch between the iPad keyboard when writing and back to the stylus can be a confusing process. You switch to the settings page (which can be flipped from behind the note taking page), press the stylus setting buttons that seem like they should work and then flipp back to the note page. It is kind of like using a pen that you know has ink in it but will not write, and when it does write it’s not where or how you wanted it to come out.
There are other note-taking applications on the market that do as well as Moleskine. Evernote is a lot of reporters’ favorite tool because, from a smartphone, it can record video and upload it to the Web, store pictures, capture articles from the Internet for later reading (Read-It-Later style) and is cloud-accessible from any device.
HTC’s upcoming tablets, the Flyer and the Evo View, have stylus applications called Notes and Sketchbook that allow audio recording while taking notes with a stylus and can be synced with Evernote. Moleskine, despite its features and slick interface does not yet match up to these other applications.
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